Redbone: The Millionaire and the Gold Digger

Redbone

The Millionaire

and

the Gold Digger

Ron Stodghill

Dedication

For my mother,

Krisseda Ashworth Pryor

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Part I

The Millionaire Bachelor

Part II

Mistresses, Motives, and Murder

Part III

Evidence of a Femme Fatale

Epilogue

Afterword

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Mortui vivis praecipiant

Let the dead teach the living

—Karl Rokitansky,

pioneer of

modern pathology,

circa 1860

prologue

It is a cold rainy afternoon in February 2003, and I am riding alongside Charles Mittelstadt in his black sport utility vehicle across the potholed streets of east Atlanta, past rows of boarded-up factories that stretch out into the hard gray distance. A lean, square-jawed man in his late thirties, Mittelstadt is a private investigator who has traded me access to his client in exchange for my own findings in the Lance Herndon case.

So, here we are, Mittelstadt says, pulling into a crowded parking lot. You know the rules. Anything that’s gonna jeopardize her case is off-limits.

I gaze out at a colossal slab of concrete. The Fulton County Jail looks less like a building than a gigantic street curb with a door.

Got it?

Yeah, I got it.

We dash through the rain into a poorly lit netherworld of justice pending, a kind of ant farm in slow motion, of waiting loved ones and lawyers, of pistol-toting officers grazing here and there, of paper-shufflers moving back and forth inside their Plexiglas, of folks cursing the long lines, emptying their pockets into metal lockers, weeping softly in their seats, and all this activity funneling down into a palpable sense of despair that leads to one place: through a heavy metal door that opens automatically and then shuts behind us with a thud of such unsettling permanence that I look back and realize that I am now sealed away with hundreds of criminals and an underpaid female guard escort who guides me through the dim concrete corridors into a small, nondescript room furnished with a jumble of metal chairs and a defunct, prehistoric-looking computer.

And this must be her standing in the doorway, her lips curled slightly in what seems to be a smirk or a bashful smile. She holds out a limp hand for me to shake, its temperature as cold as one of these cinder-block walls. She is wearing typical inmate garb—the navy blue cotton jumpsuit, with a white T-shirt beneath. Her clothing hangs off her loosely, so that her limbs protrude like metal hangers against cotton sheets.

I try to imagine what Lance Herndon saw in this woman standing here in front of me, what she looked like before the jail time. I try to imagine her laughing and talking to Lance. Cooking for him, seducing him, traveling with him, everything.

But mostly I try to imagine her murdering him.

PART I

the

millionaire

bachelor

chapter one

BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE

On a balmy April evening in 1996, surrounded by the thumping beat of R & B music, Lance Herndon tapped his tasseled loafer on the marble floor and watched his guests pour in. The sight must have pleased him. He had invited some four hundred friends and business associates, and by a quarter after nine more than half had already arrived. He couldn’t have dreamed up a more ideal night for a party. The nightclub, a circular glass-enclosed room at the top of Atlanta’s downtown Hilton Hotel, offered a panoramic view of the city. Outside, the full moon hung so low and luminous that majestic Stone Mountain, thirty miles east, glowed as though right across Peachtree Street.

The occasion tonight was the celebration of Lance’s forty-first birthday. The man looked good. Except for the gray flecks in his curly dark hair, he could have easily passed for thirty. It didn’t matter that he was not a particularly handsome fellow, that he had a ruddy complexion and a slightly crooked smile. He was the founder and CEO of Access Inc., the largest black computer consulting firm in the Southeast, and he exuded prosperity. On this Friday evening, Lance was dressed casually chic. His trademark white silk pocket square blossomed like a tulip from his navy blue, single-breasted designer suit, giving him the debonair, about-town flair he was known for. His cream French-cuffed shirt was unbuttoned low enough to let the chest hair breathe in place of his usual smart necktie.

Within Atlanta’s young black jet set, the crowd with which he liked most to be associated, Lance was known for his extravagance. Indeed, he had come to view himself as a kind of master emcee, a Gatsby-like presence whose lavish spending served as a barometer of the times. On his fortieth birthday he had celebrated in South Africa by taking his guests barhopping in a white stretch Mercedes Benz limousine. Here, on his forty-first, the outer rim of the dance floor was lined with tables holding mounds of Gulf shrimp and exotic cheeses, ornate pastries and lavish chocolates, and bottle upon bottle of wine and champagne. The spread, along with the sweet perfume of the women mingling with the scent of roses and lilies, crystallized notions that the man with L.H.H. monogrammed on his cuff was a player around town. It may have helped, too, to distract from the unsettling truth that Atlanta’s gilded age, forged some thirty years prior by the city’s black old guard, was coming to an end.

In Atlanta, the black elite was divided into an older generation of insular, tradition-bound natives and a younger, high-living group of nouveau riche transplants. Both groups were obsessively image-conscious, though it was in the latter that Lance had stature, and in which he wanted to continue to amass cachet. Lance had earned his reputation in technology. Access Inc. assisted companies in developing sophisticated information networks, and he had been so successful that Inc. magazine had included it among America’s Top 500 enterprises. But Lance considered this achievement to be of secondary value. His real prowess, he often boasted, was in the network of relationships he had nurtured and built across town with high-up people at Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, and Wachovia Bank, for example, and within such professional organizations as the prestigious Leadership Atlanta, and a bundle of others, from the Atlanta Business League to the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and the Data Processing Management Association. He had become a central figure in the social scene of the city that was the capital of the New South.

To be sure, nobody understood more clearly than Lance the necessity of reaching out to the city’s older black establishment—the Jesse Hills and Herman Russells and Coretta Scott Kings—and he had successfully made many of those contacts as well. It was said among Lance’s colleagues that his networking of Old Atlanta was genius. He knew how to get what he wanted from that set, even though he was not part of it—not invited to socialize with the Alexanders, the Dobbs, the Scott clique. Admittedly, he was not particularly fond of this crowd, though he felt that he understood them. They were, above all, a proud people. Proud of the fact that their great-great-grandfather was a medical doctor or lawyer or once ran a successful business on Auburn Avenue. Proud that Atlanta was the only city in the world with five black colleges in a central area. Proud that Atlanta was a place where you found fifth-generation college-graduate blacks, unheard of in most other cities. He understood that in Atlanta, it wasn’t necessarily money that made you part of that clique. It was heritage.

Lance may have lacked the pedigree of Atlanta’s established black bourgeoisie, but he had plenty of drive. In this, he typified the wave of young black strivers who had migrated to Atlanta and other southern cities over the past three decades. Atlanta was the epicenter of this buppie gold rush, as the city’s black population had more than doubled during that period. The last time so many blacks packed their bags at once was during the Great Migration of the 1930s to flee the oppression of the South for freedom and factory jobs in Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland. This time around, the lure of white-collar corporate and government jobs and warmer weather had spurred an epic U-turn that demographers called the Reverse Migration.

Lance Herndon was known for outworking old and new Atlantas alike. He was the sort who measured the success of his day by how many new avenues he had opened up for himself and others, spending weekday evenings working the cocktail circuit and attending dinners and meetings with his clients in the IT division of some large company, where he was constantly reaching out to this guy and offering him four Braves tickets for Saturday afternoon; or to that lady inquiring about her smart daughter at Yale who might make the perfect summer intern for an attorney friend of his; or scheduling coffee and cocktails and phone conversations in this or that city with what seemed like everyone with a meaningful business card. For years, the result had not only been double-digit growth in revenues at Access, but an ability to call in favors from some of the most prominent leaders across town, straight up to Mayor Bill Campbell.

Tonight’s fete, though, was aimed at courting not the city’s old guard but rather what Lance liked to call the beautiful people—his real contemporaries—that crowd of young, fashionable black professionals, the athletes, entertainers, and entrepreneurs and all their various groupies who gave Atlanta’s nightlife its pulse. They were his social soul mates, so to speak. They were the high-rolling, Gucci-wearing cats and their stiletto-heeled women who fancied the dramatic over the mundane, who on other evenings pulled up to Atlanta Nights or Mr. Vee’s or The Parrot in their chromed-out Lamborghinis and Aston Martins where hulking nylon-shirted goons with six-pack abs rushed the car to spirit them into perfume-scented VIP heaven.

Tucked in Lance’s wallet was always a slip of paper folded down to the size of a Chiclet, listing some three dozen very hot women and their phone numbers. The list never left his possession. For years, his Friday-afternoon routine was to dial them up one by one and tell them to meet him at Atlanta Nights for happy hour. The draw was always big. Women he had not even invited would show, and so long as they were easy on the eyes, Lance didn’t mind a bit. It got to a point where at 6:00 P.M. on Friday, women would drive by Atlanta Nights, and upon spotting Herndon’s platinum Lotus—lately it had been the Porsche—parked in his customary front space directly under the neon, they would sashay in to eat and drink on his dime. One of them usually followed him home. Sometimes two.

Tonight, Lance strolled through his soiree and greeted his guests. A great many of them, as usual, were women. The room went quiet as all eyes were riveted on a three-tiered, chocolate-frosted birthday cake that had appeared in the center of the dance floor, its forty-one candles glowing in the dark like a mini constellation. As Lance moved through the crowd toward his cake, he looked genuinely humbled, especially when he was greeted by the lead singer for the Atlanta-based R & B group Silk, a gifted tenor who riffed melodically through a Grammy-worthy version of Happy Birthday. Lance blew out the candles, and applause erupted. Then the deejay went back to work, kicking in with rap trio Salt-N-Pepa’s funky hit Push It.

As the crowd converged onto the dance floor, Lance put his arm around an unfamiliar young woman. A petite size four, fair skin, fine straight hair, she was everything he liked. Redbones, he called them. Jerking his shoulders back and shuffling his feet—Lance loved to dance, even though he had no rhythm—he threw his arms up high, his world cloaked in a kind of weightless, enchanted air. With the music pumping and his guests partying hard, Lance leaned into the creamy cheekbone of his blushing new admirer and whispered something in her ear. He may have mused that life didn’t get much better than it was that very moment.

Lance Herndon was born in Harlem on April 4, 1955. His parents, Russell and Jackie, were working-class people a generation removed from a long line of Florida and Virginia farmers. An only child, tiny in physical stature and prone to every manner of childhood ailment, Lance is said to have cried his way through the first couple years of his life. His wailing usually got him his way, as he spent much time in the care of babysitters. His mother clocked as much time as she could as a clerk at J. C. Penney’s.

Russell’s reputation is that he was neither dependable nor much involved in his son’s development. When he wasn’t hustling odd jobs like trucking local retail merchandise across the boroughs, Russell ran with a group of barhopping men in Brooklyn who called themselves the Hundred Dollar Club, a loosely knit party frat whose sole requirement for membership was paying a few bucks to the brothers anytime you were caught with less than a hundred dollars in your wallet. We wore the best suits in town, Russell boasted about his threads in those days. Man, I stayed in Pee-air Car-deen!

Jackie and Russell split before their son reached adolescence. With Jackie so busy working—she also regularly played bridge with girlfriends, often late into the night—Lance spent much of his childhood alone at home. By the time he was a teenager, he was accustomed to being governed by babysitters and strict handwritten notes from Jackie on how his time was to be spent. I was pretty much raised by notes, he would later tell his employees, defending his preference for communicating by notes at the office.

Lance loved his mother, but he worshipped his paternal grandfather, John Harrison Herndon. He would later name his own son after his granddad. John Harrison was a slightly built, deeply religious man who, along with his wife Elver, lived off the land in Farmville, Virginia, an hour west of Richmond. Because of the strain in his parents’ marriage, Lance, from the age of seven until thirteen, lived with his paternal grandparents in the small rural town. He attended elementary school by day and helped tend to the cows and chickens and farm tobacco in the late afternoon. A deacon in the local Baptist church, John Harrison warmed to the curious young kid and tried to teach him everything he knew about running a farm. The first lesson, of course, was starting the day early. Granddad and grandson would rise together at dawn, eat breakfast, and begin their duties. In perhaps his first lesson in entrepreneurship, Lance was given a calf by his grandfather, who trusted him to raise it. John Harrison would later take Lance to sell the steer at market, giving the boy cash for his work. Lance was forty years old when John Harrison died. At the funeral, he cried like a baby.

Lance proved to be no more successful at the altar than his parents. He spent his twenties floundering through two brief marriages; first to a pretty Puerto Rican woman, and again to a rather clingy Creole from New Orleans ten years his junior. Neither marriage lasted far beyond the first anniversary. It was while vacationing in Brazil in the early 1990s, that he met his third and final wife, Jeannine Price, a flight attendant for Citibank. By then, he had graduated in computer science from City College of New York and moved to Atlanta to launch Access. The firm, whose specialty was providing staffs of computer technicians to build networks and databases for businesses, had grown quickly to boast such clients as Coca-Cola, Hartsfield International Airport, and NationsBank. He was thirty-five.

Jeannine Price, a native of Kansas City, Missouri, was a refined black woman, a debutante sort and devout Catholic who had invested most of her time throughout high school and during college at the University of Missouri–Kansas City studying ballet. Upon graduating college, she danced with a Kansas City ballet company and had hoped one day to join the Dance Theatre of Harlem, the only black classical company in the nation. But after several knee injuries, she had been forced her to give up her dance career. She became a flight attendant, first in commercial and then corporate. At Citibank, many of her trips were international flights.

Years later, Jeannine would regale friends with the dreamy story of a weeklong trip to Rio, how the atmosphere was festive because of Carnivale, a traveling celebration of Caribbean culture. The city was in full swing, with lots of drinking and dancing, but she was alone, and so she decided to take a tour bus and visit the statue of Christ. The bus climbed Corcovado Mountain and the scenery was magnificent, breathtaking—the Rio de Janeiro skyline and the white beaches along the coast of the city. The place was packed with tourists when she got off the bus, but she eased her way through the crowd until she got to the base of this gigantic statue—Christ the Redeemer, it is called—and when she looked up, she was in awe. There was Jesus towering over the city with his arms open wide, as though embracing the skyline. It was humbling to stand there in the shadow of this spiritual monument, and she remembered thinking, Here I am, thousands of miles away from home, standing at the base of this majestic statue in this gorgeous country. It’s sunny, it’s clear, and I wish there was just somebody, anybody, in this sea of people—everyone seemed to be speaking Portuguese—to share this moment with. As Jeannine was thinking this, she heard someone speaking English and the crowd seemed to open up, and there stood this black man. Small, dark brown, with a thick mustache, he made eye contact, came over, and they started a conversation. He said he was over there on vacation with his accountant. She couldn’t believe it: suddenly, here she was with this beautiful man. It seemed more like fate than coincidence. Meeting your man in a foreign country beneath a statue of Jesus, she said. It just doesn’t get much better than that!

Within a year, in 1990, they were married and building their dream house—a six-thousand-square-foot colonial in the exclusive hilltop community of Northcliff, a wealthy suburban enclave in Roswell, about thirty minutes north of Atlanta. Situated atop rolling green landscape, the Northcliff subdivision ascends from the Chattahoochee River. Their house, 9060 Bluffview Trace, sat secluded behind quiet, narrow streets in a cul-de-sac of lush trees and foliage, its facade of gray stucco and white marble lattice barely visible to neighbors. Inside was a unique trilevel floor plan; the master bedroom, along with the kitchen, living room, and dining area, were set on a hill at ground level while below, with sweeping landscape views, was a large entertainment area and several guest bedrooms. The bottom level was a bright office suite for Access Inc., where Lance’s employees worked under his strict guidance.

Jeannine admired her husband’s